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How American Natalie Bieule soared to make her Paralympic dreams come true

Natalie Bieule
Natalie Bieule competed in the T44 final for women’s discus throw on Sunday. (Getty Images)

The bird shows up most days, watching her train from above.

Natalie Bieule likes to think it’s her grandfather, Joaquin. Life took one of his legs, too. Well, actually, cancer did before he passed away at 69. Hers was claimed by a drunk driver in a head-on car accident a decade and a half ago when she was 18. Her right leg had to be amputated below the knee. The same leg as the one her grandfather lost. He sometimes called her Joaquina.

The accident that made her an accidental Paralympian in the F44 discus event happened back home in Miami. She had just graduated high school, and she was headed to a friend’s house to stay over.

“I just remember getting pulled out of the car and telling myself I need to stay alive and see my mom one more time,” Bieule recalls. “The Jaws of Life extracted me out of the passenger’s side.”

“I had a dancing career ahead of me,” she remembers. “That’s what I wanted to make a living out of, theater and dancing. And then I got a lot of ‘You can’t’ and ‘You won’t be able to.’ It was a difficult thing for me, but I think my life turned out better than I would have ever expected. I wouldn’t take it as misfortune; I take it as life-changing.”

Bieule – pronounced bee-YOU-leh, or as she puts it, “like crème brûlèe” – doesn’t know what happened to the drunk driver. She didn’t care to find out.

“That’s not part of my life anymore,” she says.

Her life became something different entirely. But not for a while. After spending the first month after the accident in a wheelchair, she got her prosthetic leg. Dancing was an important part of her big Cuban family. The doctors said she wouldn’t dance anymore.

“They told me, ‘No,’ ” she says. “But that’s the thing with me: You tell me, ‘No,’ and I’m gonna prove you wrong.”
Bieule practiced dancing on her prosthetic leg on her own in her room. Three months after the accident, she danced a salsa with her dad on Father’s Day. He told her she danced better than she did before. To this day, all he wants for Father’s Day is a dance with his daughter. She obliges him every year.

Bieule built a life. She never did become a dancer, but she took up kickboxing and spinning. She married her best friend from high school, Matt, and they had a daughter, Ava. She got into CrossFit after that. “I just never wanted her to see me as someone missing a leg, so I started doing some box-jumps and weight lifting,” she says. But her prosthetics kept breaking.

So she went to an amputee convention to look for a better one. There she met five-time Paralympian and gold medalist April Holmes. Well, Holmes met her, really. She called out to Bieule from across the room and more or less told her she was going to be joining the United States Paralympic track and field team.

“She looked athletic. She was young,” Holmes recalls. “I said, ‘Wait a minute, she can throw something or run something.’ I figured she could be in the Paralympics somehow. She was already doing CrossFit so she had the confidence. So I went, ‘Hey, you!’ And she was like, ‘Who? Me?’ She had talked to the Paralympic volleyball team, and I said, ‘Absolutely not.’

“The rest is history. She did the rest on her own.”

“I had never touched a discus before in my life,” Bieule says. “The muscle was there. It was a matter of learning how to throw. Discus reminds me a lot of dance. It’s coordination, it’s hips, it’s legwork.”

Within seven months, she had not only made the national A-team, but also immediately won the 2014 national championships in her category and set the U.S. record with a throw of 28.96 meters. And then she got pregnant again. But she trained through all nine months of carrying Valentina. Doctors, as ever, were skeptical. And, as usual, she did it anyway.

She had a C-section in March 2015 and won nationals again in June. In October, she placed third at the world championships in Doha, breaking her own American record by a meter. Two years after taking up the sport, she is ranked third in the world, above much more experienced discus throwers.

Bieule took a leave from her job as a fourth-grade teacher to train for the 2016 Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro full-time. She worked out for 5½ hours a day, five days a week.

But about that bird, and her grandfather.

She trains in her backyard. And the bird often perches atop the barn next door and observes as she flings her disc toward the white fence, sometimes clearing it.

“I used to watch the Olympics with my grandfather,” Bieule says. “I feel like he’s been along with me in this journey.”

“The bird is not always there, but the majority of the time he’s there,” she says. “He’s just sitting there. It’s always the same bird. He’s all white and makes this caaack noise. I like to think that he’s followed me. I like to tell myself that he’s watching.”

The bird had both its legs. And it flew south.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.